Reasons

Managed Services
Are the Future of Integration
In the broadest sense, the term managed services
describes the management of a business function
by a third party. Examples of commonly consumed
managed services include building maintenance,
payroll, and customer service to name a few. The
strategy behind managed services is simple: increase
efficiency and decrease cost by offloading work
that is not central to an organization’s mission to a
specialized provider.

This strategy has particular resonance in the IT

industry, with companies increasingly relying
on outside providers for a large variety of
technology services ranging from email hosting
to data storage to network monitoring.
In fact, 49% of CIOs and other managers
recently surveyed indicated their companies’
IT functions are either mostly or partially
outsourced.1

Integration, however, due to a long legacy

of do-it-yourself integration models such as
ESB and, more recently, iPaaS, is rarely part
of the managed services equation. But this
is changing—and with good reason.
Actually, five good reasons.

1 CompTIA, Trends in Managed Services, May 2015

 5 REASONS MANAGED SERVICES ARE THE FUTURE OF INTEGRATION
You’ve got better things to do
Running an in-house integration platform is a lot
of effort. The extract, transform, and load (ETL)
processes that are the foundation of integration
require considerable IT overhead to develop and
maintain, yet provide no strategic business value in
and of themselves. By partnering with a managed
services provider that can take over these ‘plumbing’
operations, enterprises are afforded the breathing
room to move internal IT staff onto more strategic
projects that drive revenue and serve the business’
core mission.
Cost-effectiveness—on many levels
Enterprises often invest large amounts of capital on big
IT undertakings only to discover that once the project is
complete, many months to years later, the technology
is obsolete or requires a major upgrade. In these cases,
cost is not predictable. A managed services approach
neutralizes cost uncertainties through its fixed pricing
structure and proven ability to efficiently implement the
solution required. What’s more, its economies of scale
are able to provide the solution at far lower costs than
individual enterprises would invest otherwise. As an
added bonus, CAPEX dollars turn into OPEX dollars under
the subscription pricing model of managed services,
freeing up capital for other growth initiatives.
“By 2018, more than 50% of the cost of
implementing 90% of new large systems
will be spent on integration.” 3
“93% of CIOs and other managers said
their managed services arrangements
either met or exceeded cost-savings
expectations.” 4
Your very own Center of Excellence
When integrations are built inconsistently, a single department
or line of business at a time, there is a high cost to be paid in
terms of inefficiency and fragmentation of enterprise-wide issues
such as data security, compliance, and governance. A Center of
Excellence combats these issues by pooling people, processes,
and tools for economies of scale and centralized oversight.
Integration expertise is no longer trapped in functional silos and
integration building blocks can be catalogued and reused. And
guess what? Managed services providers, by their very natures,
are Centers of Excellence.
“By 2017, in large organizations, at least 65%
of new integration flows will be developed
outside the control of IT departments.” 2
Easy access
access to tothe
thelatest
latestand andgreatest
greatesttechnologies
technologies
By leveraging the infrastructure of the integration provider,
whose core focus
By leveraging the(unlike yours) is to
infrastructure of evolve the integration
the integration platform,
provider, whose
enterprises have access to is
the
tomost current and cutting-edge
core focus (unlike
technologies—from
yours) evolve
microservices
the integration
to JSON to tomorrow’s
platform,
genius
enterprises have access to the most current and cutting-edge
new breakthrough—without having to invest time and money into
technologies—from microservices to JSON to tomorrow’s genius
implementing these technologies.
new breakthrough—without having to invest time and money into
implementing the technologies themselves.
Today’s data landscape demands it
Several disruptive forces at play in today’s market are dramatically
increasing the amount and complexity of data with which
organizations must contend. This, in turn, is dramatically
increasing the complexity of integration. For example, Big Data is
flooding enterprises with new types of unstructured and semi-
structured data; the breakneck adoption of SaaS is creating
hybrid environments that further silo data between on-premises
and cloud infrastructures; and the diminishing role of the once-
monolithic ERP is ensuring that enterprises have more diverse
applications than ever before to integrate. As complexity outpaces
resources, the breathing room, economies of scale, cutting-edge
technologies, and cost-effectiveness that integration as managed
services has to offer will only become more compelling.
“By 2020, fewer than 20% of multinational
organizations will continue to plan and adopt an ERP
strategy based on a single instance megasuite.” 5
2, 3, 5 Gartner, Adopt a Strategic Approach to Application Integration for
Postmodern ERP and Business Applications, July 2015
4 CompTIA, Trends in Managed Services, May 2015
 5 REASONS MANAGED SERVICES ARE THE FUTURE OF INTEGRATION

INTRODUCING dPaaS

Data Platform as a Service (dPaaS) is a new market

category of cloud-based platforms that provides
unified and tailored integration and data management
solutions as fully managed services.
Reconceived from the ground up to directly address the disruptive
technologies complicating today’s integration operations, dPaaS is
a better approach to integrating the enterprise. Learn more about
dPaaS and the industry’s first ever dPaaS solution, the Liaison
ALLOY™ Platform, at www.liaison.com/liaison-alloy-platform.

About Liaison Technologies

As a leader in cloud integration solutions since 2000, Liaison
Technologies is shaping the integration marketplace with
innovative solutions designed to meet today’s toughest data
challenges. From complex integration to data management
to the brave new frontiers of Big Data, our secure solutions
break down data silos, reduce inefficiencies, and uncover
actionable insights.

Contact Us / info@liaison.com / 1-866-336-7378 / www.liaison.com